


a 2hiip, a troll, above, below...

by VastDerp



Category: Doctor Who, Homestuck
Genre: F/M, i ship this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-14
Updated: 2011-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-27 07:48:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VastDerp/pseuds/VastDerp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Body horror romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a 2hiip, a troll, above, below...

"So," he says, awkward in the silence of the holding bay, "I see you've got fiber optics."

"Yes." She fiddles with one of the cables shunted to her temporal lobe. "This one is a Model 4400-N30 Kiwi-Zen for controller biological homeostasis. Fairly old-fashioned, but perfectly serviceable for short range medical use. It's cheaper to maintain and replace than the N42, and while cost is not a factor for my masters, they are not the ones who hire the contractors. Some things never change with my species."

He nods, understanding precisely fifty percent of her explanation.

"I suppose it's useless now, since they've retired my hardware." She sighs. "And now I don't know where I am."

"Yeah," he shakes his head. "Same."

She tosses the cable back over one frail shoulder, feeling the weight of it shift against her skull, and wonders whether she can remove it herself, now that she's dead. This is an unpleasant thought. It's been a long time since the KZ was installed, but she remembers the flashes of pain in between transmissions whenever she was upgraded. "Is your interface alive?"

He has never been good at small talk, so he nods again.

The Controller reaches out one corpse-white hand, strokes her claw-fingered hand from the bridge of the Helmsman's goggles to the smallest tangle of obscenely wet flesh-pink growths creeping along his cheek. Behind the lenses, his dead white eyes flash brief violet at her touch and he hisses through his oversized and jagged teeth.

"Oh! I'm sorry!"

She withdraws her hand quickly and looks down at her lap, where some of her non-vital cables have begun to come loose from the sockets and wilt to the dusty floor around her. His own mass of bioware trails for meters behind him, across the dull gray brushed-metal floor of the bay. "Did I... hurt you?"

"I'm all right," he mutters. "They're a little sensitive, that's all."

"I'll be more careful," the Controller promises. "Would you help me up, please? I've never walked on my own."

"Sure," the Helmsman shrugs. "Been a while for me, too, but I guess it's like riding a two-wheeled device, how you're supposed to never forget once you learn." He staggers to his feet, maintains his balance, and offers her his orange-clawed hand.

" _Hah_. Looks like the old adage was r--"

A shudder of the floor beneath his boots proves too much for him, and he topples. He lands with his upper body draped across the dead cables and soft upper body area of the Controller. It knocks the wind out of both of them and they lie there a moment, trying to gasp.

"Are you all right?" he asks with his first regained breath. He tries to untangle his wasted arms from her various attachments, but he's somehow become stuck to her. She pushes herself up on her elbows, lifting him as well, and looks down at his face. Her milky eyes are amused.

"Quite," she tells him. "Remember, we _are_ already dead. And even if we were alive, you're all bones anyway. Here, let me help you with that." She unhooks one of his horns from her GI tube, careful not to brush the clinging wet tentacles drying into a sticky mess on his spiky black hair. 

Their faces are close. She can smell blood and something sweet on his breath. The sound of his breathing, out of time with her own, is strange to her.

She continues to try and disentangle the smooth gray disk of her temperature regulator from where it's become snarled in pulsating living wire, but it's not going well. She swears under her breath, a curse she picked up from a talk program on one of the evenings she was permitted to observe the transmissions as they shot through her neural net.

He begins to make a terrible, dry grinding noise, and it's just so alien that she's shocked into stillness. It takes a moment for the Controller to realize the Helmsman is _laughing_.

"Look at us," he cackles. "Two of the biggest thinkpans in the afterlife, tied together by our fucking _peripherals_."

"Be quiet, will you?" she rolls her eyes, amazed that she _can_ roll her eyes, now that she's self-directed again, "I need to disconnect us without poking you, and you're moving around."

His alarming gray laughter diminishes in to breathless wheezes, but he holds as still as he can while she patiently disentangles them. It's getting more difficult because his cables seem programmed to ensnare any object that comes in contact with them. In just the short time he's been lying across her chest, the strange tendrils have begun to embrace the both of them.

His cheek brushes hers, cold on cold, and she wonders if she really minds all that much.

Under them, the ship shudders again as the Star Whale speeds up, carrying its lone passengers to places unknown.


End file.
